The other day I wrote about the crazy names created to describe vast amounts of data, such as an exabyte. We are quickly getting to the point where the amount of data traffic and storage that currently exists is pretty ridiculous itself. New reports say 100 million pictures a day are uploaded to Facebook – for a total of 60 billion. That is triple the combined total of Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. Every day I search YouTube for interesting videos and I marvel at the volume of video that is added by the minute, most of which will be seen by only a handful of people associated with the uploader. Thirty-five (35) hours of video are uploaded every minute on YouTube. Less than a year ago it was 24 hours every minute. Where is all this data stored? Server farms. According to a report from Data Center Knowledge that was updated last November, Facebook has 60,000 servers, and Intel topped the list with 100,000. Facebook keeps your info in data centers in California, Virginia and Oregon, which has its own Facebook page. Don’t forget to “like” the data center. The entirety of your Facebook existence could be stored there.More

Wael Ghonim is awesome. He is the Google exec who was a catalyst for the Egypt Uprising. He was detained by the Egyptian government for 12 days. Ghonim, an Egyptian who oversees Google’s marketing in the Middle East and Africa from Dubai, said he was blindfolded the entire time, but he was not tortured. He was detained on Jan. 27, two days after protests calling for President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster began. Wael was an administrator for a Facebook page in honor of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old man who died last year in the custody of the Egyptian secret police. After his release, Ghonim confirmed that he was an administrator of the Facebook page. On Tuesday, Ghonim joined the protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Ghonim told his bosses that he had urgent personal business and took vacation time to go to Egypt. More

See that cell phone in the top right corner of the photo? The Internet and SMS text messages may have been disrupted by the Mubarak regime, but cell phones and cameras were not rendered inoperable. This Jan. 28, 2011, photo was taken with a Blackberry in the neighborhood of Imbaba near Cairo. The photographer got it and other photos onto Flickr. How the photographer did that, I don’t know. The only regular Internet that was working was the one functioning ISP serving the Egyptian Stock Exchange. Others had the option – albeit very expensive – of using satellite phone services. But it really didn’t matter. The damage already was done on Facebook and Twitter and text messages rallying the Egyptian people to protest after Friday prayers before the Internet crackdown. One TV newscaster on Al Jazeera English believed that the loss of online information actually drew more people outside to find out what was happening. I also think that the protesters, without the need to keep uploading photos from their phones or check for updates on their computers, were left to be singularly focused on causing a breakdown of government authority. On Friday night, President Obama urged the Mubarak regime “to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the Internet.” In reality, the regime cannot sustain the disruption unless Mubarak is prepared to take Egypt on a journey backwards to pre-Internet times. Sure, half the country is broke or out of work, but the other half needs ATMs and credit cards. Those don’t work without connectivity. And every minute without the Internet, Egyptians are missing out on this:

I used to think if a phone wasn’t a Smart Phone, then it was a Dumb Phone. Just like many people still say Cell Phone, even though businesses instruct them to say Mobile Phone, or better yet, Mobile Device. Now I have learned that Dumb Phones are called “Feature Phones.” They have features! I learned this because Facebook announced it was launching out a mobile version of Facebook for Feature Phones. That means hundreds of millions of people who don’t have an iPhone or Android device will be able to access their Facebook accounts on the most basic non-smart phone, like the lovely Kyocera Domino. So Facebook continues its campaign of global domination and analysts and pundits continue to speculate as to whether the company is worth $50 billion, $100 billion, or potentially $1 trillion. I once thought Microsoft would dominate the world some day. No one thinks that anymore, and I am skeptical about any company ever doing that. Except for Cyberdyne Systems.